Potteries Orienteering Club

When originally selected early this year as a venue for a POTOC local event, with encouragement from Richard Hathway of Reaseheath Adventure Sports, we thought we would be provided with a 1:5000 map covering the buildings and all of the golf course to the south. I soon found out that the new green keeper would not allow us on the golf course, nor in the bordering wooded areas.

However, the remaining campus had both intricacy and variety, so I decided to remap at 1:4000 in sprint ‘O’ format. Using as base map, the 1:5000 map developed by John Padget of DEE and derived from a 2000 Harvey survey at 1:10,000, I’d hardly started when comparison with the OS map revealed that both DEE and Harvey maps were actually about 40% bigger than their scales indicated. Neither John, Richard, nor I can explain how this could have happened. The net outcome was a (correct) scale of 1:2500 for the new map. The survey and mapping took a lot of time – about 100 hours: I’m not very fast.

I thought planning courses would be easy – and it was for the hard courses. But an easy course was difficult to plan because controls must be placed to lead novice youngsters round with minimum chance of going astray and the dense complexity of paths and buildings requires controls ridiculously close together. The simple, round-the-lake “Easy” course needed 11 controls for 0.6km!

The finishers I talked to said they enjoyed the courses, which pleased me, especially as I have never run a sprint ‘O’ myself. I think the mispunching on the hard course resulted from two controls being so close that one was mistaken for the other: not a trap that I had set deliberately. At least one competitor lost time at the gate to the adventure park area because it was padlocked and bore a forbidding notice. Sorry for that: I had expected the gate to be open.

Particular thanks to: Richard Hathway and Reaseheath College for use of the area; Jean and team for efficient organisation; John Heaton for map printing while working serious overtime; Barbara for helping set out controls; and Dave and Alex Sparks for helping us both retrieve them afterwards.

DEE may run a summer evening event on the area next year: I hope you will come along and support it.

Austin Farr

Thank you all for coming – I hope you enjoyed yourselves in the cool but dry weather – the sun did eventually come out in the afternoon. The attendance was disappointing – it is a pity that there were not more there to enjoy Austin's courses – I know he spent many hours producing our first sprint specification map.

I am sorry about the initial problems with the electronic entry barrier. We had been promised that it would be open from 8.30, but it was some time later before the college were able to sort out their computer system!

My thanks to Malcolm, Peter and Brenda on Registration, Henry on Start, Alison, Geoff, Rachael on Download, John on setting up and Gordon on clearing up - apologies to anyone I have missed out. Special thanks to non-member Alex Sparks for looking after the entry barrier before it was fully open. Finally a big thank you to Richard Hathway at Reaseheath for his help and support.

Jean Rostron